022 (Supplemental): School Sucks On A Student’s Works Cited Page?

ABOVE: If you want to get 30 extra guys in the NES game Metroid, start the game and quickly press up + down + up + down + left + right + left + right + A + B + Select + Start. Enjoy!
Who said I wasn't tech-savvy?

Topic:
Paul, a fifteen-year-old high school student and listener to the show, asked me to provide some assistance with a psychology project he's working on. The topic is public education. He was actually told about the show by his English teacher.

One comment

Brett outdoes himself once again with participating in a dialog that answers questions to those who are here for the first time. Actually I think this should be heard as one of the first podcasts in the series to help people get a feeling of the public school system.

Brett is very careful to tip toe around labelling or accusing a specific cause to the public system, which I find surprising. Maybe it’s because this approach of discussing the public school system by a student in school needs to be treated with high sensitivity, not to put the student in a position of conflict with his school but rather to enable the student to keep the topic open at school in a respectful way. Brett’s approach to how the school system became as it is today is explained as a natural process, that it’s not a conspiracy theory, I’m not sure if I agree in this description.

When I look at the education I was taught, back in South Africa, the emphasis on certain ideals and concepts were bigger topics than others, being that they were emphasized as being more important. What this did was mask other arguments that could have been used as a way to question the topics in focus. The school curriculum provided a clear and easy way for teachers to overlook some major important topics. Some examples are Nicholas Tesla that is hardly discussed at school or Vladimir Vernadsky, that’s like going through school and never hearing about Einstein, that to me seems pretty intentional and conscious but at the same time I see Brett’s point. It’s not that the teachers and the headmaster and everyone in the system is consciously trying to brainwash the kids, but they are in the same box as the children themselves, the blind leading the blind. Maybe it’s a bit of both, a bit of intentional misguidance on propagation certain facts that are perversely taking out of context to hide other facts that don’t serve the establishment, while at the same time there is a natural process of human nature influencing how the system is evolving.

A great reference Brett makes is to the documentary of ‘Century of the Self’, many of Adam Curtis’s documentaries are “gold” sources to the history of the western system, definitely recommend giving it a watch because it will clear some misunderstandings which are going on today and don’t make sense.

‘Authority Addicts’ – a perfect coining of what public schools produce, it’s these kind of phrases that break through to new perspectives that make learning so interesting.